Embedding VC Newsletter - Dec 2024

Dec 2024 NEWSLETTER

Hi friend,

What a remarkable journey 2024 has been! Hope you had a great holiday break with your loved ones 🎄!  Welcome to the December edition of the Embedding VC Newsletter, where we provide insights into the latest developments in our portfolio and the AI ecosystem.

👋Refresh about Embedding VC:

If it is the first time you received our newsletter. As a fresher, we invest $100K to $1M checks into early-stage generative AI startups. If you or your founder friends are building something exciting, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].

🗞️Vectors In The News

  • Research Breakthrough: researchers from Augment developed an innovative way to learn directly from developer workflows within their open source environment, called Reinforcement Learning from Developer Behaviors. The results lead to improvements equivalent to doubling our model size or using 10x more training data. 

  • Free for OSS contributors: following the official launch of Augment’s Developer AI for teams platform, the company decided to make their platform free for open source contributors and maintainers. This initiative can address two fundamental challenges in open source:  1. The steep learning curve for new contributors trying to understand large codebases  2. The time-intensive back-and-forth between maintainers and contributors on PRs.  

  • New Funding Round: GetMyHome AI raised a $1.5M pre-seed round to serve sophisticated second-time home buyers and save them money. The National Association of Realtors legislation that passed earlier this year means that homebuyers and sellers can pay significantly lower commissions to real estate agents. Their product currently lives in the LA/SoCal area. 

💡New Embedding Vectors

Embedding VC joins Flora AI’s Pre-Seed round 

  • Keywords: AI creative tools 

  • What they do: Flora is Cursor for creatives: the first creative tool that lets creators automate the entire creative process. They have all the best creative AI models on one infinite canvas, which creators can connect together to automate creative workflows. They are building creative agents that can create & run these workflows on their own. 

  • How they stand out: Weber and Alex started Flora because current AI creative tools are built by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative.Most AI tools are optimized towards fun, because they are built for AI Native consumers, not AI Curious professionals. Creative professionals would love to use AI to supercharge their work and get stuff done faster, but they need to have creative control to create high quality outputs. Flora’s vision is to maximize creative agency.

🎤Builder Spotlight

Aiswarya Sankar, Founder and CEO of Entelligence

Meet the Founder: Founder and CEO Aiswarya worked as a Machine Learning engineer at Uber for the last 4 years and started Entelligence out of frustration at how inefficient large tech teams have become. She built the first NLP deep learning model at Uber Freight, and has published multiple papers at top AI conferences. Aiswarya obtained her Bachelor degree in EECS from UC Berkeley, and worked in Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research as a researcher. 

Founder Fireside Chat - Q&A with Aiswarya

Q: What inspired you to start Entelligence?

A: During my years working as an ML engineer in big tech, I noticed engineering teams spending around 60% of their time on overhead - documentation, PR reviews, meetings, cross-team collaboration, and support channel messages in slack.  Add to that the considerable time it takes for engineers to gain enough context to be fully productive. This is a huge drain on engineering productivity and that's what drove me to create Entelligence - a suite of engineering agents that streamline these workflows.  Our agents , plus an engineering manager portal that provides detailed team insights without the reporting overhead.  Entelligence enables engineers to focus on their most impactful work and removes all the other overhead.

Q: What are you most excited about for the next three years?

A: It's extremely exciting for me to participate in the current transformation in the engineering landscape.  We're moving toward flatter organizations where everyone has a deeper understanding and ownership of the product and tech stack. The traditional boundaries between product, sales, and engineering are blending, creating more direct alignment between these functions.  This shift will fundamentally change companies from just writing code faster to shipping and building meaningful products faster.

Q. What have you enjoyed about working with Roger and Embedding VC?

A: Roger has a really strong engineering network.  He's been very proactive in helping to facilitate key introductions to potential key hires, other startups to collaborate with and intro to the ELC annual conference that has accelerated our growth trajectory. 

What We Read at Embedding

  • Machines of Loving Grace: an essay by Dario Amodeim, CEO of Anthropic, on how AI could transform the world for the better. In the essay, Dario talks about that quite a bit of benefit arising out of what current AI researchers are exploring now, and envision power AI systems that are smarter than a Nobel prize winner, set up with modern, capable interfaces, and able to do autonomous tasks, a phenomenon he calls a “country of geniuses in a data center.” 

  • 2024: The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise: Menlo Ventures surveyed 600 U.S. enterprise IT decision-makers to reveal the enterprise AI landscape. Survey shows that AI spending surged to $13.8 billion this year, more than 6x the $2.3 billion spent in 2023 — a clear signal that enterprises are shifting from experimentation to execution, embedding AI at the core of their business strategies. Inside the Enterprise, Code copilots are the most valued use cases with 51% adoption – an area Embedding VC is most excited about, and made four investments as well.  

  • Reimagination of everything: How intelligence-first design and the Next Stack will unlock human+AI collaborative reasoning: The AI world is changing rapidly. Insight Partners believe that the applications being built today and tomorrow will be fundamentally different from the ones of yesterday. For builders, the real opportunity lies not in who can glue AI onto old platforms, but in who can build new, intelligence-first applications from day one. Those are the companies that will likely redefine entire industries and labor and services markets, and they are the founders we are most excited to support.

👋 See you in 2025! Keep building!

See you soon! We are Embedding VC.

Embedding VC invests in early-stage Generative AI startups.